


Through the strait pass of suffering

by middlemarch



Category: Downton Abbey, Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: F/M, Female Friendship, Grief/Mourning, Nurses & Nursing, Poetry, Tea, Widowed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-22
Updated: 2018-01-22
Packaged: 2019-03-07 23:25:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13445628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: Each new dawn was a disappointment. That she must face the day.





	Through the strait pass of suffering

It was not one of her better days. She could tell from the expression in Anna’s eyes regarding her in the looking-glass, a more accurate barometer than any other measure. Certainly, Mary couldn’t appreciate much relative change in her misery, a word she thought she had plumbed the depths of during the War, a word she now knew she had understood but glancingly. Matthew had been dead six weeks and if she slept the night through, she had to remember with her waking that he wouldn’t. Most nights were broken and the truth never left her.

She found herself in the library most afternoons. It was the longest time before the infinite nights; the mornings were filled with tea-cups and newspapers, a spoon dragged through steam, the rustle of the ironed pages. There was the baby to see, his small face unlike anyone else’s in the world except perhaps Sybbie’s, and the nanny and nursery-maid didn’t know her well enough to consider passing a comment when she left. If Matthew had lived, she imagined they would have spent hours there or taken the baby in his beribboned pram for idling walks, Matthew’s hand always at her back. Without his father, the connection with the baby was tenuous, the comfort of him negligible. There were letters to attend to after the nursery, to attempt at least, and windows to look through as if it would make Matthew appear. Then luncheon with her grandmother present daily, whose acerbic conversation was the gentleness Mary could best tolerate.

But the afternoons held nothing. Nothing that could console or anesthetize her, so she retreated to the library and its volumes, its fortress of chesterfields and the gloom that hovered among the wing-chairs. She picked books from the shelves and opened them or she left them closed in her lap. Several had uncut pages and she wondered who’d bought them. Matthew would have liked the mystery but she did not—neither liked nor disliked it. Her grief was encompassing and left her with the dimmest awareness of any other emotion. Or it protected her from a fury so vast that it would destroy her in a way despair could not. There was no one to discuss it with; she resigned herself to not knowing.

“Lady Mary, there is someone here to see you. If you will?” Carson announced as sonorously as he ever had. He was the same, she could even pretend it was 1912 before Patrick died and she was only waiting to be asked one simple question.

“Yes,” she answered, acquiescing now as she would have then. Without the pause she’d tormented Matthew with once.

The woman he ushered in looked faintly familiar. Perhaps it was only that she looked vaguely like Mary herself once had, dark-haired and fair-skinned, with a kind of confidence she had never valued before it was gone. Her clothes and hat were well-made but unadorned, the quality in the material, the cut and not any other decoration.

“How do you do?” Mary said, gesturing at the sofa across from herself. The other woman sat down and looked at her for a moment before she spoke.

“Very well, thank you. I don’t suppose you remember me, Lady Mary. May I remind you of our acquaintance?”

“I think you must,” Mary said.

“I’m Mary von Olnhausen, the Baroness von Olnhausen but you wouldn’t have known that before,” the Baroness said. She did not have a German or Austrian accent at all, in contrast to the name, but she was not English.

“Before?”

“During the War, when Downton Abbey was a place for convalescing soldiers, I was here then. I was a nurse,” the other Mary explained.

“Oh. A long time ago.”

“Yes. It seems that way—and not at all, sometimes. Sometimes I think I will turn around and find myself short of bandages, about to be scolded by Sister Hastings again. And then I remember, it’s over.” She spoke easily, this Baroness nurse, as if they were old friends readily reacquainted, and yet there was a certain quality in her manner that spoke of intent observation. 

“It is. And Downton is no longer the place you knew. Did you come—that is, why did you come back?”

“Because of Sybil,” the former nurse said, as if that explained anything.

“Sybil? I don’t know what you mean, she’s dead too,” Mary said shortly.

“I know. And yet it’s true—would you let me tell you how?”

Mary nodded. The grief she carried for Sybil was a different one, pearl alone where Matthew’s was diamond. And leaf and sky and breath.

“As I said, when I was here last, I was a nurse—and so was your sister. Even though it was her home, she seemed to spend as much or more of her time with us, the nursing staff, that is, as she did with her family and she was so diligent, so whole-hearted about everything she undertook…she and I, we became friends, as odd as it might sound,” the other Mary said.

“It sounds just like her. But I don’t understand how you come to be here.”

“You never noticed the rest of us then. I don’t mean to give offense, but I think you must agree it was true. You were entirely focused on Mr. Crawley, making sure he was properly nursed, and we could all see it, even if you didn’t see us. You cared for him so well.”

The pain that came with the memory was sharp again and gripping like the contractions she’d never had a chance to tell Matthew about. It was a wound re-opened when she’d thought she was barely held together by the animal need for her child, the thousand small kindnesses of those who loved her and still lived. It was unbearable; if she held a cup, it would be shattered against the floor in this moment. She knew it was her voice that she heard, but it was a snarl she’d never allowed herself before.

“That’s why you’re here then? Because you are a nurse, because you’re here to nurse me through this? You can’t and I won’t let you!”

“No. I’m here because I’m like you,” the other woman replied calmly. Or rather, not calmly, but not shocked, not distressed or disapproving or even unsettled.

“Like me?”

“A widow. The widow of a man who was very much loved,” Mary von Olnhausen said. 

“But you were a nurse,” Mary said. 

“Oh, I was so many things. An American in England, a Baroness and a menial, why shouldn’t I be a widow and a nurse? My husband died in 1913 and I found without him, I had no idea what to do with myself. Who I was besides grieving. The War, it gave me a purpose, a way to be, well, if not myself again, then at least, some self. And Sybil reminded me of how I’d once been, how I might be again, how enthusiastic and devoted she was. She was so very dear,” Mary who was a nurse and a baroness and now, somehow, familiar, explained.

“She—we lost her…before. How could she have asked you here, now?”

“It was not Sybil herself. Mr. Branson, he wrote to me,” the reply came with a pause. Mary made some sound to indicate _Proceed_. “Sybil and I had written to each other and when she died, Mr. Branson wrote to me. We have corresponded a little, not as she and I did, but grief can make you so very lonely and I gather it can be difficult here, when you are not born to…this,” she said, gesturing lightly at the walls of leather-bound volumes, the height of the ceilings, the windows that opened out onto gardens before the vista.

“Tom wrote you?”

“He did. He does. And he wrote that he thought I might be of some help to you. I’ll admit I’m still enough a nurse I’d like to try.”

How direct she was! It was impossible to tell how much was her American forthrightness and how much her nature, how much she might be altering herself to put Mary at her ease. Sybil would have liked it and Matthew, Mary found herself thinking before she could stop herself; Matthew would have very much enjoyed the baroness’s manner, that lilt in her voice and that industrious morality. And he would have wondered at the hint of unrelenting sadness in her dark eyes in a way Mary did not need to.

“How would you?” she asked. Once, she would have been coldly furious with Tom or dismissive of anything a stranger had to offer. Once was a very long time ago.

“Oh, I don’t know. Not exactly. Except I found it helped to talk to someone who had suffered as I had. To talk and to sit quietly. I wouldn’t believe anyone who tells you there is a prescription for grief, nor any powders nor tonic.”

“What should I say?” She meant it obliquely, but that was not how it was taken.

“Whatever you like. I’ve no expectations of you, nor you of me. Not really. Perhaps you won’t want to say anything at all. Perhaps you’d rather write to me, as your sister did. I’ve been told I’m a rather good correspondent, as long as I don’t go on too long about mathematics or the efficiencies in nursing regulations.” 

“I don’t think I can go on,” Mary said suddenly. That was it and why shouldn’t she say it? It was almost like speaking to her image in the glass or to Matthew’s too-quiet ghost. 

“Why should you?” the other Mary replied. “Everything is different now, why should you simply go on?”

To hear it said aloud—it was not a relief but it was something like that. She felt her eyes fill with tears she would not let fall.

“Then what? What is there?” she murmured. “They all want me to be consoled by the baby, but how can he? I was happy before he was born and now, I can never be.”

“There may be something, however small. Something to discover. Maybe something that calls to you or something you search out. I didn’t have a child, I can’t tell you how much that will help. I can tell you it will not take Mr. Crawley’s place. Nothing can do that.”

“Is this what you write to Tom?” Mary said.

“Oh, heavens no! We write about Boston, we both have family there. American politics, a little, how best to educate Sybbie, and Yeats. We’re both very fond of Yeats,” the other woman said, sharing the details in a way Mary recognized, the way she would talk to a very skittish horse to calm it. How she had once spoken to Matthew when his back was so badly injured and he would not face her.

“I haven’t read him much,” Mary said, to be able to say something.

“I’m sure Tom would lend you some books. If you haven’t enough in here. It might help, reading. It does for some.”

“And for others?”

“That’s the thing about suffering. It’s always the same, always different. The only blessing is, everything changes,” Mary von Olnhausen said, sounding almost as old as Granny, as young as Rose. 

“Except the dead. They don’t change,” Mary replied flatly.

“D’you know, I think they do. As we do, they keep pace with us. It seems that way to me, it seems less lonely. The way the moon is always at your back if you are walking at night, if you can’t sleep.”

“That’s how it’s been for you?” Mary asked.

“Yes, except for when it hasn’t. I don’t know that I am being quite as much a help as I’d hoped, but then, I’m not as wise as the woman who helped me. Dear Matron, she didn’t mince words but she’d a way with them none could match.”

“Perhaps not, but perhaps wisdom isn’t what I need most,” Mary said, with the faintest hint of her old wit. 

“Oh!” the other Mary laughed. “He was right, Mr. Branson, he said you were a rare spirit!”

Mary could hear Tom’s voice saying it, that look he’d have in his eyes. She could see how Matthew would have nodded, his blue eyes warm, and how Sybil would have smiled broadly, grinning so that Granny would have scolded.

“What I need most,” Mary repeated, taking in Mary von Olnhausen before her in her sober blue wool suit, the gleam of gold on her finger unexplained, the light in her dark eyes not requiring explanation. “A friend, a comrade.”

“A fellow-traveler,” Mary von Olnhausen said thoughtfully. And smiled, not broadly as Sybil would have done, nor roguish as Tom once was, but with that considering intelligence that Matthew had had. And with a generous kindness that must be all her own. “And if I may, as a fellow-traveler, ask something of you now?”

“Of course,” Mary said.

“Might we have a cup of tea?”

“Certainly. I’ve been remiss in not offering you something,” Mary said.

“No, not remiss. Simply otherwise occupied. But I suspect we could both do with a cup. It’s a trick of English nursing I’ve never forgotten, that curative cup of tea, and sometimes it did the most for those nursing, not their patients.”

And then suddenly, Mary remembered her. The nurse Mary von Olnhausen had once been, in her starched pinafore and cap, her rounded American vowels as she murmured something, as she set the china tea-cup down beside Mary’s arm, when she had been keeping a vigil by Matthew. 

“You put in too much sugar,” Mary said, feeling the cup’s weight in her hand, the heat leaching through the shell of porcelain. The comfort of being seen, when all she could do was watch Matthew, his every labored breath needing her utmost attention.

“Perhaps. It’s hard to tell what’s sweet enough, what’s strong enough,” the other woman said. It wasn’t an argument or even a question, just an acknowledgement. When the tea arrived, Mary let the cup be prepared for her and when she sipped, she found it suited her, the balance achieved. And the company. When Anna helped her undress that night, Mary saw in her eyes how she had been altered, just enough to manage the next day.

**Author's Note:**

> I saw there was some talk on Tumblr about a Downton/Mercy Street crossover and though no one asked me, I decided to explore my take. Here, I wanted to see if I could find a way for these two to connect and to struggle with a lengthy conversation between two women with the same name, neither of whom uses a nickname. The title is from Emily Dickinson. For the record, I imagine that ring on Mary von Olnhausen's hand is a gift from Jed Foster, but there was no reason to go there in this story.


End file.
